Quotes About Contradiction

It is much easier for me to imagine a praying murderer, a praying prostitute, than a vain person praying. Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.

Ambivalence and contradiction energize nearly every figure Michaelangelo carved, from the adolescent Madonna of the Stairs onward...But the four allegories atop the sarcophagi raise them to a symphonic crescendo. Each is a battleground of conflicting emotions and motives, in which will and paralysis battle for supremacy.

Abraham, Jacob, or even Moses produces a more concrete, direct, and historical impression than the figures of the Homeric world—not because they are better described in terms of sense (the contrary is the case) but because the confused, contradictory multiplicity of events, the psychological and factual cross-purposes, which true history reveals, have not disappeared in the representation but still remain clearly perceptible.

Das Leben lieben und zugleich die Menschen verachten, das geht selten gut aus.

His voice ached with a loneliness that contradicted his words. Sandstorm

Reason and instinct have an inveterate habit of cancelling each other out.

Some things are just perfect, even when they don't make any sense

There is no document of civilization," he wrote, "which is not at the same time a document of barbarism." That line is on his tombstone now.

Sympathy for victims is always counter-balanced by an equal and opposite feeling of resentment towards them.

No!" Jimmy protested.

Now that I have found someone, I'm feeling more alone... than I ever have before.

I would like to say that, as the protester finished his shower, I was disturbed by the contradiction between my avowed political materialism and my inexperience with this brand of making, of poeisis, but I could dodge or dampen that contradiction via my hatred of Brooklyn's boutique biopolitics, in which spending obscene sums and endless hours on stylized food preparation somehow enabled the conflation of self-care and political radicalism.

the more profound the statement, the more reversible; the deep truths are sedimented in syntax, the terms can be reversed, just as there is no principle of noncontradiction, no law of excluded middle, governing the unconscious. Then, briefly serious, Klaus would touch my shoulder: A quote like that can save your life.

The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

Hating Britain is a fundamental part of being British

however, Greenspan remained firmly opposed.

Hypocrisy as humor pushes destruction of standards.

I can't stand what people do to each other. I think we're brilliant as a species. I think we are amazing. I think that God is incredible, that He just gave us everything. Everything in our face. Everything for us to use. And sometimes we're such shitheads. And it makes me crazy.

Every anarchist is a baffled dictator.

quiere decirse que rezamos con pólvora.

A Conservative government is an organised hypocrisy.

A Conservative Government is an organized hypocrisy.

It takes a lifetime of practice to betray yourself without showing any effort, to be so dream-locked and absent that you say the reverse of what you mean, over and over again, to do the opposite of what is good for you.

There are exceptions to all rules, but it seldom answers to follow the advice of an opponent.